Perl in a Nutshell

Chapter 20. PerlScript

PerlScript is an ActiveX scripting engine that allows you to incorporate Perl within any ActiveX scripting host. PerlScript can be used on the client side (Internet Explorer 4.0) or in Active Server Pages (ASP) generated by web servers like IIS or WebSite Pro. To use PerlScript with these applications, you must have Active State’s ActivePerl with PerlScript installed on the local machine (or you can use a network-based installation of each).

Since a local Perl and PerlScript installation is required, it is not practical to deploy applications that use client-side PerlScript across the Internet. Nevertheless, in situations where you have control over the desktop configurations, as in an Intranet environment, client-side PerlScript offers tremendous opportunities for browser-based application development.

Server-side PerlScript does not have this limitation. To use PerlScript on your web server, you don’t need to worry about how the end user’s desktop is configured. As long as you are running a web server that can use ASP, you can use PerlScript on your web server.

With the free distribution of Netscape Navigator source code, the availability of PerlScript is likely to broaden significantly. This is an area of development that you should keep an eye on if you like the idea of extending Perl’s power to web authoring.

PerlScript is implemented into HTML pages or ASP pages via the Document Object Model used by the ActiveX scripting engine. Scripts are virtually ...